Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing Speaker Series: Roberto Navigli

Roberto Navigli is Professor of Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he leads the Sapienza NLP Group. He is one of the few researchers to have received two prestigious ERC grants in AI on multilingual word sense disambiguation (2011-2016) and multilingual language- and syntax-independent open-text unified representations (2017-2022), selected among the 15 projects (out of 10,000) through which the ERC transformed science. In 2015 he received the META prize for groundbreaking work in overcoming language barriers with BabelNet, a project also highlighted in The Guardian and Time magazine, and winner of the Artificial Intelligence Journal prominent paper award 2017 (and a subsequent AIJ prominent paper award in 2023 on the NASARI sense embeddings). He is the co-founder of Babelscape, a successful company which enables Natural Language Understanding in dozens of languages. He served as Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (2013-2020) and Program Chair of ACL-IJCNLP 2021. He will serve as General Chair of ACL 2025.

Abstract:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen an explosion of interest in recent years, with many scientific and industrial applications relying on key scientific and technological developments in the field. However, Natural Language Understanding (NLU) – which requires the machine to get beyond processing strings and involves a semantic level – is particularly challenging due to the pervasive ambiguity of language. In this talk I foster a vision focused on the mutually synergistic interaction between multilingual explicit and latent representation and processing of meaning at word and sentence level, and I will discuss the recent developments and challenges of three key tasks in NLU, namely Word Sense Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling and Semantic Parsing, and their connections to BabelNet, a popular, very large multilingual knowledge graph while keeping an eye to the most recent development of generative AI, like ChatGPT.

Relevant Publications:
Roberto Navigli, Michele Bevilacqua, Simone Conia, Dario Montagnini, Francesco Cecconi: Ten Years of BabelNet: A Survey. IJCAI 2021: 4559-4567 https://www.ijcai.org/proceedings/2021/0620.pdf

Abelardo Carlos Martinez Lorenzo, Marco Maru, Roberto Navigli: Fully-Semantic Parsing and Generation: the BabelNet Meaning Representation. ACL (1) 2022: 1727-1741https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.121.pdf

Pere-Lluís Huguet Cabot, Simone Tedeschi, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Roberto Navigli: REDFM: a Filtered and Multilingual Relation Extraction Dataset. ACL (1) 2023: 4326-4343 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.237.pdf

We continue the CIRSS speaker series in Fall 2023 with a focus on “Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Computing”. We will meet on Fridays, 9-10am Central Time, on Zoom. To join a session, go to the current week’s session and click the “access” link, which will lead you to a calendar entry. There, click the “PARTICIPATE online” button to join a session. Recordings of past talks can be found next to "access" if available. The event is open to the public, and everyone is welcome to attend! This series is hosted by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS). If you have any questions, please contact Jana Diesner and Halil Kilicoglu.

If you are interested in this speaker series, please subscribe to our speaker series calendar: Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar.